From Lovecraft to Borges to Gaiman, a century of intrepid literary experimentation has created a corpus of dark and strange stories that transcend all known genre boundaries. Together these stories form The Weird, and its practitioners include some of the greatest names in twentieth and twenty-first century literature.Exotic and esoteric, The Weirdplunges you into dark domains and brings you face to face with surreal monstrosities. You won't find any elves or wizards here...but you will find the biggest, boldest, and downright most peculiar stories from the last hundred years bound together in the biggest Weird collection ever assembled. The Weirdfeatures 110 stories by an all-star cast, from literary legends to international bestsellers to Booker Prize winners: including William Gibson, George R. R. Martin, Stephen King, Angela Carter, Kelly Link, Franz Kafka, China Mieville, Clive Barker, Haruki Murakami, M. R. James, Neil Gaiman, Mervyn Peake, and Michael Chabon.

THE WEIRD was compiled and edited by Hugo Award-winner Ann VanderMeer and World Fantasy Award-winner Jeff VanderMeer. They have recently co-edited such anthologies as Best American Fantasy; Best American Fantasy 2; Steampunk; Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded; The New Weird; Last Drink Bird Head; Fast Ships, Black Sails; and The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities. They are the co-authors of The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals: The Evil Monkey Dialogues. Jeff’s latest books include Finch, a World Fantasy and Nebula Award-finalist; the short story collection The Third Bear; the non-fiction collection Monstrous Creatures; the coffee table book The Steampunk Bible (co-authored with S. J. Chambers); and the writing guide Booklife. Ann is the editor-in-chief of Weird Tales magazine, the oldest fantasy magazine in the world, and is a regular contributor to the popular science fiction and fantasy web-site io9. Together, they have been profiled by National Public Radio and online at WIRED. com and the New York Times’s Arts Beat blog. Both active teachers, they have taught at the Clarion and Odyssey writing workshops and the teen summer camp Shared Worlds, where Jeff serves as the assistant director. They live in Tallahassee, Florida, with too many books and four cats.

“What is good about the majority of these stories is precisely that they leave you with many more questions than answers, the mark, in my view, of a superior kind of fiction... It does, in fact, what most of our best fiction does, irrespective of category.” —Award-winning author Michael Moorcock, from his introduction

“These texts, dead and/or not, burrow, and we cannot predict everything they will infect or eat their path through. But certainly your brain, and they will eat the books you read from today on, too. That is how the Weird recruits.” —China Miéville, bestselling and award-winning author of Embassytown, from his afterword

“The Steampunk Bible is an informed, informative and beautifully illustrated survey of the subject.” —The Financial Times

THE WEIRD: TABLE OF CONTENTS

Alfred Kubin, “The Other Side” (excerpt), 1908

F. Marion Crawford, “The Screaming Skull,” 1908

Algernon Blackwood, “The Willows,” 1907

Saki, “Sredni Vashtar,” 1910

M.R. James, “Casting the Runes,” 1911

Lord Dunsany, “How Nuth Would Have Practiced his Art,” 1912

Gustav Meyrink, “The Man in the Bottle,” 1912

Georg Heym, “The Dissection,” 1913

Hanns Heinz Ewers, “The Spider,” 1915

Rabindranath Tagore, “The Hungry Stones,” 1916

Luigi Ugolini, “The Vegetable Man,” 1917

A. Merritt, “The People of the Pit,” 1918

Ryunosuke Akutagawa, “The Hell Screen,” 1918

Francis Stevens, “Unseen---Unfeared,” 1919

Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” 1919

Stefan Grabinski, “The White Weyrak,” 1921

H.F. Arnold, “The Night Wire,” 1926

H.P. Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror,” 1929

Margaret Irwin, “The Book,” 1930

Jean Ray, “TheMainz Psalter,” 1930

Jean Ray, “The Shadowy Street,” 1931

Clark Ashton Smith, “Genius Loci,” 1933

Hagiwara Sakutoro, “The Town of Cats,” 1935

Hugh Walpole, “The Tarn,” 1936

Bruno Schulz, “Sanatorium at the Sign of the Hourglass,” 1937

Robert Barbour Johnson, “Far Below,” 1939

Fritz Leiber, “Smoke Ghost,” 1941

Leonora Carrington, “White Rabbits,” 1941

Donald Wollheim, “Mimic,” 1942

Ray Bradbury, “The Crowd,” 1943

William Sansom, “The Long Sheet,” 1944

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph,” 1945

Olympe Bhely-Quenum, “A Child in the Bush of Ghosts,” 1949

Shirley Jackson, “The Summer People,” 1950

Margaret St. Clair, “The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles,” 1951

Robert Bloch, “The Hungry House,” 1951

Augusto Monterroso, “Mister Taylor,” 1952

Amos Tutuola, “The Complete Gentleman,” 1952

Jerome Bixby, “It's aGoodLife,” 1953

Julio Cortazar, “Axolotl,” 1956

William Sansom, “A Woman Seldom Found,” 1956

Charles Beaumont, “The Howling Man,” 1959

Mervyn Peake, “Same Time, Same Place,” 1963

Dino Buzzati, “The Colomber,” 1966

Michel Bernanos, “The Other Side of the Mountain,” 1967

Merce Rodoreda, “The Salamander,” 1967

Claude Seignolle, “The Ghoulbird,” 1967

Gahan Wilson, “The Sea Was Wet As Wet Could Be,” 1967

Daphne Du Maurier, “Don't Look Now,” 1971

Robert Aickman, “The Hospice,” 1975

Dennis Etchison, “It Only Comes Out at Night,” 1976

James Tiptree Jr., “The Psychologist Who Wouldn't Do Terrible Things to Rats,” 1976